No, I don't mean to brag. Actually I do.
I have wicked fast internet because my internet is fiber. Actually.
Let me show you. Let's go on a field trip. Come on. Let's go. Okay.
So here in my garage, I have at and T fiber coming right to my house. Like here,
check it out.
This right here is the reason I have fast internet and I just unplugged the
internet. My family's out to get really mad.
Let's go see mil turned off the internet.
I have gigabit internet, 1000 beautiful megabits per second.
Thanks to this little cable right here. A fiber optic cable now. Sure.
Good old copper ethernet. Cable's pretty amazing.
And let's go signal going down this wire,
giving you this YouTube video you're watching right now, but dude,
this cable right here,
literally light traveling down this cable. Think about that. Pulses of light,
traveling down this little bitty cable to bring you this video.
Isn't that amazing? So this fiber optic cable, how does it compare to Ethan?
How does it work? Where do we use it and how do we use it?
And why is it the main way we get internet across the world?
Let's talk about that.
This is episode 13 of my CCNA course,
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coffee. So here is our fiber optic cable. Now unlike our ethernet copper friend,
he does not use electrical signals to send stuff across his wire.
Like we just talked about, he uses light, light pulses,
travel down this cable ones and zeros, all the internet stuff.
How does that work? Well, before we go into that, let's talk about why. I mean,
fiber optic cables are cool, but why use light to send internet traffic? Well,
light is, uh, kind of fast, right? Like the speed of light. I mean that,
one's kind of obvious, right? But that's one big reason.
We use light to transmit internet data or internet to traffic.
It's wicked fast traveling at the speed of light.
Now it's not actually the speed of light. It does take a 31% cut.
We'll cover why here in a moment, but it's pretty ding fast.
Like we've measured one hundreds of Tets per second.
That's Tets with the T not gigabits crazy fast.
And honestly the bandwidth limits are theoretical.
We really can't put a cap on it, but this cable cannot only just go fast,
but it can go far. And I'm talking far like this cable stinking long.
Now I know this cable right here. Isn't very long,
but we could make this cable crazy long single mode fiber,
which will cover what that means here in a moment can run up to 100 kilometers.
That's about, I think, what 60 miles.
And it does that without hurting the signal. It has low attenuation attenuation,
kind of a big word attenuation with basically any medium is the rate at which
the signal decreases. So when you think about an ethernet cable,
the longer an ethernet cable gets the strength of its electrical signal
degrades.
That's why we normally cap out around a hundred meters when making an ethernet
cable. But with fiber optics, man, we don't have that problem.
Light can just travel and it has super low attenuation, 60 miles man cave.
And see it. Now light has one more noteworthy advantage over ethernet, no EMI.
And honestly that's pretty cool because think about ethernet cable,
they are copper wires with electricity flowing through them.
And that produces in the electromagnetic field.
E easy for me to say a field around it.
And when you have than at cables that are close to each other, or you know,
have power stuff going around it that can cause crosstalk and interference and
mess with your, your packets and your traffic, essentially. It's not good.
And it causes issues. Light does not have any EMI.
It does not produce an electromagnetic field. Therefore,
no EMI issues just clean pew right through. So why use fiber optics?
Why use light? I it's fast speed of light.
It can go far and there's no EMI.
So it sounds like Ethan cables are losing at this point.
And you might be wondering why doesn't everyone just use fiber optics right now?
Why Usenet cables? Well, well, there's a reason and, and we'll cover that,
but now let's talk about the science, the, the wonder,
the magic of how this actually works, because remember everything in technology,
it's basically magic. It's all Harry Potter. It's awesome.
So there are two types of fiber cables you're gonna see in the wild.
We've got our single mode fiber and our multimode fiber.
Both are absolute beast and they're amazing,
but they do have their differences and you use them in different situations.
Let's talk about multimode first, this guy right here.
If we cut open a multimode cable, which I'll do right now, kind of expensive,
you won't be able to see much because it's ridiculously tiny.
And that's one of the benefits of fiber optic cable. It's very lightweight.
So to help you see it,
I zoomed in really close and thank you community fs.com cuz that's
impossible. Anyways. Here's what the cable looks like. Here's the guts.
First we have the core,
which is what the light actually travels through with multimode fiber.
The cores actually pretty big compare. I mean, cuz it's pretty dang small,
right? But it's actually 10 times larger than single mode fiber.
And we'll explain why that's important.
And it's usually between 50 and 62.5 microns inside microns.
That's a new one, right? What is that? Well, it's a measurement for small stuff.
It's 1000000th of a meter.
It's a tiny and you might see it as a funky look and symbol, you know,
the messed up you and the M that's micro. And then just outside the core,
we have the cladding, which are both multimode and single mode fiber.
It's gonna be about 125 microns.
Now as far as what the core is made of typically it's gonna be plastic with
multimode, but it can be glass,
but most of the time plastic now how light travels down this core is actually
pretty cool. Here's the drawing of the core. So here's what it does.
The light will actually bounce off the walls. Like my kids,
my kids are like fiber and this bouncing is kind of like reflection.
Like if you're to bounce, you know, light off mirrors.
I think about that scene in the mummy where they shine light through the tomb.
Now the reason the light bounces off the walls is because of refraction,
which you might recall from school or maybe bill NY or something that weird
pencil thing where the pencil looks freaking weird where it kind of bends and
doesn't look right.
That's refraction when light enters another medium like water or in our case,
fiber or glass, it re reflects kind of bends changes,
angle and starts doing weird stuff.
I remember I said earlier that we don't actually get the speed of light when we
have light going through our cable. It's because the light is change medium.
Sure. In a vacuum, the speed of light is the speed of light.
But going through our glass structure or our plastic structure here,
it's about 31% slower, but still fast. Right?
Are you complaining now how we make the light bounce through the core and make
it travel all the way through the cable.
Even when you have it like bendy and circle, which by the way,
you should never ever, ever do this to fiber.
Never because it's glass and plastic. And when you do that,
it breaks and fiber is unusable when you kink it like that.
So that's why you wanna keep it, you know,
kind of rolled up in a spool like this, just FYI never bend your cable,
but the reason it can travel through, even through the bins and curves of a,
of a fiber cable is because we change the angle a bit.
We find what's called the critical angle that allows it to bounce right through
that cable.
Kinda like when you have your phone and you have like some light shining off of
it and then you shine it into your friend's eye. So they go like, oh,
what is that? What is that?
Or maybe you're sitting somewhere and someone's watches,
reflecting into your eye critical angle right into your eye.
That's kinda what's happening here. Not exactly, but kind of,
but essentially when we find our critical angle,
we get this cool thing called the turtle turtle,
turtle and internal refr refraction.
I can't say it total internal refraction, 10 times fast. Can you do it?
Basically the light hits at the perfect angle and goes right through.
Otherwise it would just Bing bounce right outside that medium.
So by getting this critical angle and total internal refraction,
it stays within the same medium of our core.
And we get internet now because our light is bouncing off the, the walls.
We do lose some stuff. We lose distance.
This is where multimode becomes a bit lesser than single mode,
even though it does have low attenuation,
it does have a higher attenuation than the single mode. And for example,
on my cable here, let me see, find it. This is my multimode cable.
It does tell me that this is limited by 300 meters,
which still whoops Ethernet's butt,
but it can't go anywhere or near as far as single mode fiber.
Now we'll talk about single mode fiber here in a moment, but real quick,
what else is going on inside this cable? Well, of course we have the clouding,
what's the cladding doing to put it simply the clouding is like a special layer
around the core to make sure the light doesn't leave the core,
make sure it doesn't bounce out.
And then the rest of the cable is just to make sure that the delicate little
fiber stuff doesn't broken because it is delicate.
So we got strengthening stuff and we got a jacket or a buffer to make the cable
stronger, but you still shouldn't bend it. Okay. Just don't bend the cable.
It'll ruin the cable and you really where'd it go. Where's my cable.
And you really can't fix these and you can't really just make a new one either.
We'll talk about that here in a bit. Now time for single mode,
he's kind of the star of the show here he is right here.
And let's say we just cut him open. Let's bust him open. Can't fix this.
Here we go. Ah, and it almost looks exactly the same.
I mean yeah, looking at it,
you really can't tell a difference because the difference really is in the core.
And we can't see that with single mode. The core is a lot smaller.
It's five to nine microns.
And this does make all the difference in the world here because with single
mode, unlike multimode, we'll say this is our multimode right here.
And this is our single mode with multimode.
We saw again that the light will Rick shape bounce refract as it goes through
the cable, but with single mode, because the core is so small,
it's nine micro rods because it's so small,
it doesn't have room to bounce around.
Kinda like strap my kids into a car seat or a straight Jack.
And because it has no room to bounce around,
it just kind of goes like a bullet or like a light right through it,
no bouncing here. And because it's not bouncing around,
it has lower attenuation attenuation and it can go further or farther,
further. I, I don't know ever want to use those single mode.
Fiber is where we get the really impressive distances up to 100 kilometers or
for us Americans 60 miles. Now I get it.
That's that's far single mode also kind of whoops Multim modes butt on
bandwidth. It actually has higher bandwidth,
which may not seem intuitive or makes sense, cuz like multimode larger pipe,
right? It seems like it'd be bigger. No. So then that begs the question.
Which one do we use multi mode or single mode?
I mean single mode sounds like it's pretty awesome, right?
Like it beats out multi mode and bandwidth and in distance.
So which one do we use? The answer is both. We use both.
One of the primary reasons we use both is because single mode is actually more
expensive to get the core of that small five, nine microns.
It takes a bit of work, some fine tuned machines, right?
Whereas multimode with as massive 50 to 62.5 microns core that's
that's that's cheese man. That's easy where we don't need that crazy distance,
but we can still get the benefit of fiber being significantly faster.
And we still get more distance than crappy ethernet. I'm sorry, ethernet.
I'm sorry. I love you, but fiber's better man.
So where do we use multimode we typically use it in buildings,
Florida floor switch to switch. And depending on the type of multimode fiber,
there are different types. We have the om 1, 2, 3, 4, and five.
You could get some serious bandwidth.
As long as you keep the distance at a reasonable distance.
You normally don't wanna go over 100 meters, even though you can,
you wanna stay under that because you get some serious bandwidth,
like 40 to a hundred gig of us per second with om, four, 10 gigs with O three,
which is what my cable is.
This is om three and I get 10 gig and it says 300 meters. So okay.
You can actually run fiber Nicks and your computer and connect that back to your
switch. I've used it to where I've connected. Uh,
my floor switches and my IDF closets to the, the main server room,
giving me a ton of bandwidth where I don't necessarily need a lot of distance.
And then of course connecting anything I need in my, my data center rack,
connecting my host, VMs to my storage, super fast fiber connections.
And when you wanna go far single modes, what you want. So connecting buildings,
connecting campuses, or if you're like at and T, which is what I have right now,
giving fiber connectivity to all your customers.
The reason they can give me gigabit internet symmetrical is because these things
have crazy bandwidth and they can go really far.
And it's this type of fiber that connects the world from connecting data centers
across the us, to connecting country,
to country with undersea fiber cables,
which these things are nuts run by like Google and Verizon and all these
backbone providers.
But these certainly look different from my dinky little cable here.
They're encase in some heavy duty protection,
like they're massive cables and sure. Um, it takes more than 60 miles to get to,
you know, from America to Europe.
So they do have to use repeaters to repeat the light signal.
So actually in case the, the, uh,
the fiber runs underneath the water with copper that has electricity to power
the repeaters and then the repeaters repeat that signal. And it's just,
it's beautiful. It's magic. Oh,
and I forgot to mention that single mode is often gonna be using glass,
whereas multimode is gonna be using plastic and, and sometimes glass.
Now I do wanna answer this question real quick. Why use ethernet at all?
Why use the sucker when fiber is pretty superior?
I mean it's it's boss mode, right? Beast mode. Well, short answer. Isn't,
Ethernet's cheaper and easier to manage. And also everything works with it.
I mean, your computer right now has an RJ 45 connection. Right?
All the heads are off my ethernet cables. I'll be right back. Our good old RJ,
45 connector. Your computer has one right now. Your switch has a ton of them.
Right. It's easy. And also it's pretty easy to make your own cables, right?
I mean, like in case you cut the heads off your cable,
you need to make it longer. Um, shorter.
We demonstrated in this video how easy it is to make Ethan at cables. I mean,
easy, easy, definitely easier though, than doing fiber cables.
Uh, you probably can't do it cause I can't do it.
It requires specialized skills to splice fiber. You need special equipment.
You're not gonna be buying a CA off Amazon and just making your own fiber
cables. If you do, let me know if you then you're crazy, but yeah,
you buy your fiber cables. Pre-made now let's say you do want to use fiber.
How do you use it? Um, cuz I mean this,
this thing on the end looks kind of weird. What is that connector?
That's not RJ 45. What do I plug this into for that?
We're gonna jump into Boon's courseware, which is fricking fantastic.
You need to check this out link below.
They've got a delicious section of their courseware on fiber optic cables,
a quick rundown on what need to know.
And we got a quick section on what fiber optic cable connectors are out there.
Cuz there are a few and this is not all of them, by the way, there are a lot,
but this is the main ones you care about.
And we'll see and use this one right here.
The LC connector is what I have right here.
This is the connection I've seen most often and used most often in my,
my career. It is used on newer fiber cables.
I say new were like that because I mean it's, it's been around for a bit,
but it's, it's some of the newest kids on the block.
And then you also have the older connectors you might still see in the wild,
like the St connector.
And then the SC connector I've honestly used both more often. I've seen the SC,
but the main point here is that you wanna make sure you get the right cable with
the right connector. So figure out what you're gonna be plugging in.
Is it gonna be a switch? Does that switch have an LC connection?
Does the device you're gonna plug into us which have an LC connection.
Well then you're good. Get an LC cable LC to LC.
They have cables that are LC to SC mix and match different heads. Just please.
I've done this to myself a lot.
Just make sure you have the li the right connectors. It'll save you a headache.
It'll save you a trip to the store. Cuz again, you can't just splice a new one,
put a new head on something. You gotta buy it right the first time.
Now you may have noticed why we've been talking about this is right after the
connector. So we have the connector here and just below it,
we've got two individual wires. What is that?
And this one right here is actually labeled a and B. Well,
this is a duplex fiber optic cable duplex, meaning it goes both ways.
One wire is dedicated to receiving and one wire is dedicated to transmitting or
sending. Now you still may be wondering Chuck, I don't get it.
The fiber has this weird LC connector or SC or ABCD, FG,
RJ 45, many whatever it has this weird connector,
but my switches have RJ 45 ports. My desktop has RJ five ports. My,
my server has RJ 45 ports. Where do I plug fiber in? Well,
some switches do just have fiber connections sitting in it.
Some of your servers might have just a fiber connection there LC.
But a lot of times what you might see is this weird looking port on the side or
maybe two or three, four, however many you have.
And it doesn't look like ethernet doesn't no, no it doesn't. It's a bit weird.
It SFP. What is that?
SFP stands for small form factor plugable but essentially it's kind of like a
wild card port. Like it can be whatever you want it to be. Hey,
I want another ethernet port. Sure. I have an SFP little module here.
See at the very end,
it's just ethernet and I can magically turn that extra port,
the SFP port into a regular RJ, 45 port by slide that sucker in bam.
And in the case, I don't want that to be RJ 45. I want it to be, come on,
come here. I want it to be fiber. Well, as you might have guessed,
they have SFP modules that are fiber. Like this guy right here.
See that looks kind of like something you might plug in this LC connector into
right? Kind of matches.
You may even see a cable like this where both ends are just an SF F P.
So you just directly connect SFP to SFP on a switch.
So I'm not gonna ask you to build a fiber cable cuz you can't.
So it won't be as you know, kind of challenging or uh,
homework to do as the ethernet video.
So just go to the store and buy you a fiber cable. If you are interested,
keep in mind. They're not as cheap as ethernet, but they're not,
they're not crazy expensive. But when comparing fiber to ethernet,
I mean fiber is like it's superior in almost every way. I mean,
there are a couple downsides, like they're hard to manage and um,
where's Poe coming from you don't get power over fiber. That's not here yet.
So ethernet does still have its place and I love ethernet, but fiber dude,
fiber's the reason I have this wicked fast internet.
So I'm very thankful and is what you're gonna be using as a Cisco engineer or a
network engineer or really any kind of it engineer, more,
most likely to connect your switches to your core switches,
Florida floor building to building fiber is everywhere and it runs the world.
So I'm hoping that this video will give you a bit of confidence,
a bit of courage when you walk into an it job and you see these weird cables and
usually to make it easier on you, they are color coded.
So if you see a yellow cable like this, that's typically code for, Hey,
this is single mode fiber. Ooh, get that bad voice still on eBay.
And when you see this like Aqua, I think that's Aqua I'm color blind, dude.
Tell me if that's Aqua comment below Aqua or orange,
that's usually gonna be multimode fiber. So, you know, show off,
walk into a data center and go, Hey. Yeah. That's that's multi mode fiber.
Let's take a look at the writing on it. Oh yeah, yeah. That's om three.
It goes that fast. How many microns is that? Oh yeah. It's 50 microns.
That's that's a wide core conversation piece of dinner. Right. But anyways guys,
that's all I got today. If you wanna see how well, you know, fiber,
if you wanna see how well you absorbed the information from this video,
I got a quiz in the link below or a description.
I've got a link in the description below. There we go. How about,
how about that? Test your knowledge. Give it a,
try the first person to get 100% on that quiz.
We'll get a bag of copy from network Chuck dot copy. And of course,
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